Now that I've caught Rattata, what do I do with him?

     The entertainment is so all-encompassing, you forget you’re outside. People are killed blundering in front of trains. Legislators fret.
     “It’s really getting out of hand,” said a councilman in Newport, Rhode Island, promoting a ban on something with the “potential to remove a person from the confines of reality.”
     No, not Pokemon Go, the cellphone game that has millions wandering around in a kind of global electronic walkabout. The above is from 34 years ago, referring to a previous high-tech menace: the Walkman, Sony’s personal tape recorder, which also put people in their own little bubble of oblivion.
     The most amazing statistic about Pokemon Go is not the tens of millions of users, but this: 7/7/16. The thing debuted July 7, meaning we’ve had it for five weeks. The Northbrook police have already held their own Pokemon Go event. The Walkman was around for years before government grew alarmed.
     I learned about Pokemon Go in the quaintest, most low-tech way possible. My wife noticed two young ladies walking up our driveway, phones in hand.

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The Plumber's Dream

    Sunday I met someone who was shooting photos for a calendar on ... well, I better not say, as I plan to write about him this fall. During our conversation, I mentioned a piece I wrote about the Ridgid Tool calendar for the Reader in the late 1990s, and he surprised me by digging it up. It was back in the day when my column was spiked with some regularity, either because our standards were more constricted, or I hadn't learned to self-edit.
    This piece was written for the paper, but snagged on the phrase "Ridgid Tool." I always remember Larry Green saying to me, "It's a bad joke!" and me replying, "It's the name of the company, Larry. It's on the wrench." In my memory, I glared at him and said evenly, "You're not hurting me, Larry. I'll sell this to the Reader and they'll pay me $500. You're hurting our readers, who could read this without dying of shame." That might be a bit of bravado confabulated after the fact—it sounds too bold for me. But that's exactly what happened. The Reader ran this March 25, 1999. Ridgid Tool still makes the calendar. And I still have the wrench. 

     Bought a pipe wrench the other day. The wife was going to call the plumber. "I'm calling the plumber," she said. But I said no. It wasn't just the money. I knew what the problem was—screws, tossed down the bathroom sink drain by our 3-year-old. I knew where the screws were—the U-trap, that curved pipe under the sink. All I had to do was remove it and take out those screws before they ... did something bad. Even I could do that.
     Almost didn't buy the right tool, however. After strolling with the 3-year-old to the hardware store—behold your handiwork, O my child, the heartbreak you have wrought—I almost bought an expandable pliers. Figured that would do the job, would remove the pipe, and be more useful later for other things. For holding hot rivets, say.
     But I had second thoughts. A phrase, "the right tool for the right job," bubbled up from somewhere. From the lips of some long-dead shop teacher probably. So I bought a 14-inch pipe fitter's wrench.
     The pipe wrench—and this will seem ridiculous to those who spend significant time around pipe wrenches—struck me as a wondrous object. Big, heavy, solid. I held the wrench in my hand—all the weight at one end, where the adjustable steel teeth are—and wanted to bash somebody in the head with it, just on general principles. I felt happy, safe....

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Book signings

     A book signing is an odd tradition. The author gathers together his family and friends and what interested parties he can lure into the same room. He subjects them to what is in essence a sales pitch, reads from his book then begs them to buy it. Incredibly, many do, and they line up while he takes a fat marker and scribbles his name all over copies of the pristine book to ... show what? A kind of "Kilroy was here!" territory marking? Because it's the one time in life when you're encouraged to write in books? To make it more valuable should that author turn out to be Hemingway? The odds of that are worse than a lottery ticket. 
     Maybe it's a chance to breath life into the silent, lonely world of books. To hold a kind of church service to something that, like a religion, gives our lives structure and meaning. Mine anyway. For whatever reason the tradition exists, a tradition it is, and I'm not one to buck it.  Just the opposite; I embrace it, as welcome communality in an all-too-solitary profession. 
     I almost forgot this part, but I suppose it's also a chance to meet the author. Never a high priority for me, since there's an author everywhere I go. But I see a certain novel appeal for others.
     The University of Chicago Press is publishing Out of the Wreck I Rise: A Literary Companion to Recovery on Sept. 5, and I have a busy itinerary of signings and readings, which you can always find under "Book signings" at the side of my blog. I thought I'd roll it out here, as fit Saturday fare—the contest can wait a week. 

 Thursday, Sept. 8, 7 p.m. -- The Poetry Foundation, 61 W. Superior. Join Tony Fitzpatrick, Rick Kogan and Carol Marin as we read the book's "Family" chapter. Co-author Sara Bader will be there from New York City to answer questions and sign the book with me. 

Friday, Sept. 9, 7 p.m. -- Book Stall, 81 Elm St., Winnetka. A reading and signing at this beloved North Shore institution. I'll be joined by co-author Sara Bader. And yes, there will be wine and cheese.

Thursday, Sept. 15,  12-2 p.m., Atlas Stationers,  227 W. Lake Street. There are no bookstores in the Loop, to speak of, so when the "Chicago" book was published, my friends at Atlas stepped up threw me a well-attended signing. They're doing it again. 

Westlake, Ohio

Saturday, Sept. 17, 1 p.m.  Barnes & Noble, 198 Crocker Park Blvd, Westlake, Ohio.  The Plain Dealer is running an interview, so I shrugged and decided to go to Cleveland and sign some books. I'll be on Alan Cox's show on WMMS Sept. 16 at 5:20 p.m.

Monday, Sept. 19, 7 p.m. -- 57th Street Books, 1301 E. 57th. Kennedy Forum executive director Kelly O'Brien and I will talk about the challenges of sobriety, followed by a signing.  

Thursday, Sept. 22, 7 p.m. Bookends & Beginnings, 1712 Sherman Ave., Evanston. This is the site of the old Bookman's Alley bookstore, which I patronized for more than 30 years. It was bought and revitalized by Jeff Garrett and Nina Barrett, enthusiastic supporters of the book. It's a sprawling, comfortable location Roger Carlson hosted a memorable night when "Drunkard" was published, and I'm expecting no less here, as I read my favorite passages from the book and answer questions.

Saturday, Sept. 24, Pygmalion Festival, 1:45 p.m., reading at Exile on Main Street, 100 N. Chestnut, Champaign, Illinois.  

Have a bookstore and want an event? Contact me at dailysteinberg@gmail.com. 

Good news rolls by us, if we only notice

     Trumpless Friday continues. 

     There is no proper history of the garbage can. Not that I could find, anyway.
     A shame. If you look at contemporary American life trying to find evidence of undeniable positive change, improved garbage cans roll immediately into view.

     For me, anyway. Then again, I am of an age that remembers galvanized steel garbage cans, remembers muscling them to the curb and remembers that hideous metal-on-concrete scraping sound.
    Now moving garbage is quiet and easy.  

Rolling garbage can patent

    How did that happen? 
     Jump back 70 years. Garbage was a crisis in Chicago.
     “Almost half the city’s 2,000 miles of alleys have been lined with open piles of filth,” the Chicago Sun noted in August 1946. Only one in seven garbage truck stops were made to empty “tight, strong metal cans.” Thirty percent were to pick up garbage placed in “old washtubs, battered baskets and boxes.” A quarter were at concrete containers, which garbage men emptied using shovels, a process that took five times as long as tipping a can. Another quarter, nearly, were at open piles of garbage.

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Abolishing the 2nd Amendment

   "Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. But the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know."

     By now, Donald Trump's dog whistle to the gun-nuts in the Republican Party has been picked over like a turkey carcass on Dec. 1. There's really only one thing to add.

     That one thing is: Donald Trump's crazier comments mask those remarks that are merely delusional.
     So while the political sphere vibrated with horror over Trump's smirking, coy appeal to violence, and his unshakable fans—any other kind have fled by now—explain that no, he meant 2nd amendment voters, acting as a coalition, something important is overlooked.
     Sighing—a kind of reason fatigue sets in—I want to wrench our bug-eyed gaze from the end of Trump's quote, back to the beginning. "Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment."
     What's that based on? Like many Democrats, Hillary has floated some vague ideas about stricter background checks, a bit of fine-tuning and deck chair arranging that ignores the greater problem with guns in America. Judging from Barack Obama's eight years of inaction, no rational person expects anything more. The 2nd Amendment isn't being abolished; just the opposite, it is eroding the others, draining meaning from all that "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" nonsense.
    A separate issue is the difficulty of changing any aspect of the Constitutional: two-thirds of the House and Senate must approve, then have three-quarters of the states ratify the change. Well nigh impossible in a nation that cannot get rid of the penny. 
    That's clear to those who aren't in the grip of fear. But Republicans, remember, are fear junkies, and if reality won't get them high, they cook something up. They start out scared, and then conjure up new terrors to justify their fear. The Democrats have to be continually plotting to take away guns; otherwise why would they need to keep buying more? I don't know if the whole things a conspiracy of the gun industry, or just a mass psychosis that plays to their economic interest. Probably both. Either way, the result's the same.
    So sad. Were I looking for a genuine reason to be terrified, I couldn't find anything more ominous than a GOP presidential candidate who's a cat's paw of Vladimir Putin, who can't figure out what NATO's for, or why we can't use nuclear weapons—after all, we got 'em! To ignore all that, to miss the truly frightening stuff, and point in horror at the lip-service gumming the Dems do on the subject of guns is a most perverse of hallucinations. 
    Then again, there's a lot of that going around. The least we can do is mention it. 

Suburbia isn't all neatly trimmed lawns anymore

     The front yard has Queen Anne’s lace and coneflowers, both purple and yellow. Joe-Pye weed and ironweed, hydrangea, phlox and more.
     “We have a lot of milkweed,” said Tina Paluch. “Because we like the butterflies.”
     What her yard doesn’t have a lot of is lawn; only about a quarter is grass, and that is uncut. The rest is covered by wildflowers and what some would call weeds, up to 5 feet tall.
     The small brick house sits next door to Greenbriar Elementary School in my leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook. I’ve been walking by for 16 years, admiring the front yard for both its appearance and for what it symbolizes: a departure from the lockstep green buzz cut most homeowners aspire to. The suburbs get a bad rap as cookie-cutter Levittowns of identical ticky-tacky houses and Astroturf lawns. But look closer and there is individuality there too.
     I’d never seen the people who lived there. The exact moment I was passing the house, thinking, “A real reporter would knock on the door,” a woman rolled her garbage can to the curb. Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good. I introduced myself.
     Tina Paluch, 50, lives here with her parents, Anne and Jerry, in their late 80s....
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Wheat Chex has a new box

     I feel oddly protective of Wheat Chex.
     First because it's one of only two cold breakfast cereals I still eat, the other being Shredded Wheat
    Second, because Wheat Chex seems imperiled. It can be hard to find, while Shredded Wheat is everywhere. secure. Shredded Wheat is like Cheerios — popular enough to be here forever. 
    But Wheat Chex ... it's the red-headed step-child of the Chex family of cereals.  There's always Rice and Corn and all the new varieties, Cinnamon and Chocolate and whatever, and you wonder whether they just ran out of Wheat Chex, or can't be bothered stocking it just for me.
   So when I was at a run to Sunset Foods -- trembling in the shadow of Mariano's but still managing to hold on — I paused in front of this graphic shift. The new box is on the left, if it isn't clear.  That's a good sign. They wouldn't redesign the box, then drop the product. 
    Would they?
    Since not too long ago we were mourning the change in the Celestial Seasonings box, I feel obligated to point out that the Wheat Chex redesign is a big improvement. It's cleaner. The typeface on the "Wheat Chex" is friendlier, and the see-through "X" a nice touch.

Yes, that's Elizabeth Taylor

    I did pause, uncertain, at the square of four squares arrayed on the spoon. That would never happen in the living world, of course, not unless you stuck your fingers in your cereal and set them onto your spoon like that.  Still, there's a certain purity, not unlike Wheat Chex itself, and that too is an improvement over the old box, with its droplets of milk that look like white paint.
     I probably shouldn't be eating Chex at all—the stuff is fattening as hell. A modest bowl will set you back 42o calories, with the milk, and because its mostly carbohydrates it'll leave you hungry at mid-morning. You're far better off with a grapefruit and yogurt.
     But having given up bourbon, I'll be damned if I'll surrender Wheat Chex too. Someone has to keep the faith. Breakfast cereals are on the decline, and have been for years. Sales fell 25 percent between 2000 and 2015—still at $10 billion, but shrinking.  Reasons abound. One survey said 40 percent of Millennials described breakfast cereals as "too difficult to eat," which is just sad.  They're referring to the clean-up, not the pouring milk part. But still.

1952 ad -- Wheat Chex phasing out the old name.

    Chex, by the way, was introduced in 1937 by Ralston Purina as "Shredded Ralston" (The history of breakfast cereals is intertwined with nutty American dietary fads, and just as Kellogg's started as sanitarium food for nutritional fanatics, so Ralston was related to "Ralstonism" a late 19th century movement not unlike Scientology, with various levels of progress toward a new, superior race of humans, a belief that the minds of others could be controlled through magnetism, and other assorted nutritional hoo-ha, such as a conviction that watermelons are poisonous).
    Ralston always struggled to produce a product that an increasingly important breakfast cereal demographic—children—would eat. It overcame that Hot Ralston was "steaming paste ... that children hated" by hiring Tom Mix, cowboy star, to be its mascot (his image, anyway. The actual Mix, a squeaky-voiced alcoholic, was kept out-of-sight). 
    Rice Chex was introduced in 1950, about the time the name "Wheat Chex" was introduced. Back then, the Wheat Chex squares weren't the careful geometric grids we see today, but puffier and more jumbled, closely resembling a Shredded Wheat biscuit. 

Space Patrol's Ed Kemmer finds them "tops for taste" in 1953.

    The next year Ralston tried to sell the duo to kiddies, sponsoring "Space Patrol," an early space-themed TV show. Shot on a shoestring budget with special effects considered cheesy even then, the product was woven into the plot line—members of the Space Patrol would pause from their adventures to keep their energy up by wolfing down a few bowls of Chex. 
     By 1955, Ralston Purina was trying reverse psychology. "Children," an odd character dubbed Prof. Checkerboard warned. "Wheat Chex are only for adults. Don't eat Chex."  Another commercial featured a man eating it at a fancy Victorian table complete with candelabra, announcing it was the "grown-up cereal from Checkerboard Square" (a Checkerboard is the Ralston Purina logo). 
    They kept that tack for years, edging back and forth between sincere appeals to adults and sideways pitches to kids, all the while recognizing that lots of people just didn't like the stuff ("People who don't like Chex cereals haven't tried Chex cereals," a 1976 commercial claimed, suggesting that opposition to the taste was merely notional). 
    Corn Chex showed up in 1958. In more recent years, there have been the typical palette of failed flavors-- Vanilla Chex, Honey Graham Chex. Sugar Chex. I never ate those—well, I remember giving Bran Chex a try (bleh) and Raisin Chex (not bad). 
    Anyway, too much about Chex. But we can't fret over the candidacy of Donald Trump every single day, can we?